Customer Engagement

Direct Mail has 4 times more emotional engagement with your brand than digital

That’s massive! Gigantic. And how do we know this? Neuroscience.

The Royal Mail, unsurprisingly, commissioned a research agency to understand whether there are any differences in the communications effectiveness of physical and virtual media.

Working with scientists from the Centre of Experimental Psychology at Bangor University, research participants were hooked up and passed through medical-grade scanners. They were shown the same material twice – once using projection to reproduce the on-line, virtual experience, and once printed on cards to produce the physical experience. The scanners then measured activity in different areas of the brain, to assess how the processing of marketing messages was affected by the media used.

The results turned out to be surprisingly simple: The “real”, physical materials caused a much deeper level of emotional processing than the virtual ones.

This indicates that tangible materials are more likely to become embedded in memory, and because they also generate more emotion they’re more likely to provoke positive brand associations. It’s clear that virtual media allows you to connect with more consumers, after all it is a global market, and they enjoy interacting with this media, but for keeping your message top of mind, nothing beats mixing our senses to form a better memory and better engagement with your brand.